Well their stories are the stuff of legend - Pippi being unnaturally strong, and Medusa being so frightfully hideous that any who look directly at her are forever petrified in stone. They also happen to be the characters my daughter and I chose for our Halloween costumes. She was Pippi, of course, and a winning one: she took First place in a costume contest. I was green with envy (pun fully intended.)
Donning a Medusa costume brought forth an alarming number of people who had no earthly idea what the Medusa character is. So I would explain that she is actually a rather popular character in the Greek mythologies. Which would be met with a blank stare that practically screamed Huh? The whole experience really caused me to wonder how these folks ever managed to graduate high school, let alone college. Two of the clueless are acquaintances of mine and I know for a fact they both attended universities.
Alternately, there were many who immediately recognized Medusa, and commented on the creativity of my costume, but only after they gushed over my adorable Pippi counterpart. My serpent headpiece was a conversation starter and had strangers at a local fair coming up to me specifically to touch my head and see what it was I made the snakes with.
To their credit, a great many children recognized Medusa. That heartened me. I took comfort that at least some of the younger generation were being taught the Greek tales in school, until one little ten-year-old boy looked at me and exclaimed, "Medusa rocks! She's a creature in a lot of games." Be still my heart.
I fear the tales of antiquity shall be told only in excerpts of freshly made-for-gaming plots, and the rich characters stretched so thinly across the cyber-world, that their literary significance will be lost forever.
In the immortal words of the Wicked Witch of the West, "What a world, what a world."
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